What had happened. “It was Eli,” Adriane said. Not Eli stopped them or Eli saved us, because he hadn’t. Hadn’t stopped them quickly enough; hadn’t saved us all. “Turns out he’s some kind of crazy ninja or something.”
“I thought we were dead. All of us,” she said. “But then I turn around and suddenly he’s doing flips and he has some kind of knife that he’s using like a sword and he fought them all off.”
“Six of them,” she said. “One of him.”
“Max was trying to protect you,” she said. “That’s how it happened. They were fighting him off, and he went over.”
“It happened so fast,” she said.
“He was just there. Then he was gone,” she said.
I didn’t ask questions.
Eli paced, ready for a fight. When none arrived, I forced him back to the bridge, then to the river beneath it. Otherwise I would go on my own, I said, and neither of them argued. Adriane couldn’t stop touching me, a hand on my back, a shoulder to my shoulder, an arm threaded through mine. And I let her, because it was good to know she was there. Because it was hard not to think: And then there were two.
No body washed up on the shores of the Vltava; no cops trolled its waters. No sirens blared, no lights flashed; no tourists bent over the ledge, scanning the river. No one attacked us. The bridge was just another after-hours tourist attraction, lovely and littered. Max wasn’t there waiting for us. Max was gone.
I called all the hospitals anyway. But I already knew what they would say.
4
So.
Chris was gone.
Max was gone.
The Hledači were coming for us—coming for me.
And then there was the small matter of my supposed destiny.
“Talk to me,” Adriane said. Eli stood guard outside the door. Whether to keep them out or keep us in, I didn’t know. Adriane had wanted to walk, just the two of us—too dangerous, Eli said. Not without him. Adriane argued; I couldn’t be bothered. I didn’t want to walk. The door was bolted; the pillow smelled like Max. I wanted to stay.
So she threw Eli out.
“Please,” she said. “Say something.”
Something, I thought. But couldn’t make the effort. Thumbprint-shaped bruises had bloomed on my neck in the night. I’d been marked.
She stroked my hair. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
I was on a tightrope, and I couldn’t let her knock me off. I couldn’t fall.
“I shouldn’t have let you come,” she said. “We could be home right now. Everything could be normal.”
She meant that this was my fault. I’d handed death to Chris along with a letter. Then I’d brought it to Max. She probably thought she was next.
She hugged me, wrapped her slender arms around my stiff body. I could sit here forever, I thought. Go catatonic; disappear. See how she liked it.
Adriane started to cry.
“Please don’t,” I said.
I couldn’t.
The tears came harder. She turned her face from me, crossed her arms over her chest. “He’s not dead.”
“Yes. He is.”
“Nora, I know it sounds crazy, but—”
“No.”
“You don’t know what happened.”
“We both know what happened,” I said. “We can’t—I can’t—” This time, I hugged her. She shuddered in my arms, struggling to catch her breath. “I can’t pretend it’s not true. Don’t make me do that.”
“Okay.” I could feel her draw in one deep breath, and the next, and then she pulled away, eyes dry. “Okay. If that’s what you want. Okay.”
She gave me a long, appraising look. “You need a haircut.”
I almost laughed. “I need a shower.”
“Seconded.”
“Though not as much as you do.”
“That, my friend, is a stunningly accurate insight.”
“You go first,” I said. “It’s okay.”
“You sure?”
I nodded.
“I don’t want to leave you here.…”
“The bathroom’s right down the hall. And even you can’t shower for more than half an hour.”
She grinned weakly. “Watch me.” She gathered fresh clothes and a towel, but stopped with her hand on the door. “It’s not okay,” she said. “I get that. You know I get that. But it will be. You will be.”
“Promise?”
She nodded.
“As I recall, someone once told me to disregard ninety percent of everything you say,” I told her.
The smile faded. “He should have listened to his own advice.”
5
Bury it. Somewhere hidden, somewhere deep: deep enough to silence the scream. That was all. The simple recipe for sanity, for one foot in front of the other. The only way to hold on. To keep going.
If I wanted to keep going.
6
“Get in here,” I told Eli, and he did.
“Sit down,” I told him, and he did that, too, perching stiffly on the old radiator beneath the window.
I sat on the bed, trying not to inhale Max. Adriane wouldn’t be gone for long. I needed to focus.
Here I was, in a foreign country, with this person I’d known for less than a month. This stranger. I knew he spoke Czech; I knew he hated his parents, or thought he did; I knew he had sea-colored eyes that slit when he was deciding whether to laugh. But nothing else: not how old he was, not what his life was like, not what he really wanted. I knew nothing that mattered, except that he had lied to me. I had let him.
“So. Crazy ninja skills,” I said.
“It’s a hobby.”
“Six men. With knives. Versus you.”
He shrugged.
“But apparently you also have a knife. And I guess, crazy knife-fighting skills?”
“Always be prepared.” He held up three fingers in the Boy Scout salute.
“You were ready for them.”
He hesitated. “I was ready for something.”
“They were waiting for us on that bridge, like they knew we were coming,” I said, and waited.
The words sat between us.
Finally. “There are some things you need to know.”
“About you.”
“About Max.”
I hadn’t expected that. Nor had I expected him to produce a manila folder and hold it out to me. “Or should we wait for Adriane?” he asked.
I took the folder. “Adriane won’t listen to anything you say. She doesn’t trust you.”
“But you do?”
“I don’t find that a useful question anymore,” I said. I sounded cold; I felt cold. “I want to know what you know. If I can use it, fine.”
“And if you can use me—”
“Also fine.”
“You may feel differently when you open that folder.”
“About you?”
“About everything.”
“I’ll risk it.” I opened the folder.
It took a while to leaf through the stack of photos and emails, to understand what I was seeing, in print, in pixels, in full color and black and white, in brutal, time-stamped detail. It took a while—and then the bottom dropped out.
“Who are you?” I said when I could speak.
“Eliás Kapek. Eli. Just like I told you.”
“And everything else you’ve told me?”
He held his gaze steady, giving nothing away. “I’ve been as truthful as I could.”
I closed the folder, forcing myself not to fidget with its edges. Nor would I crush it, tear it, set fire to its remains.
“You’re not Chris’s cousin,” I said.
“The Moores are perfectly safe, I promise.”
“I didn’t ask you that.” Although I should have. It should have been my first concern, because if Eli wasn’t Chris’s cousin, then someone had forged the Moores’ email claiming he was. For all I knew, someone had conveniently gotten them out of town, incommunicado.
Or worse. My brain had gone foggy. “Everything I know about you is a lie. But you’re expecting me to believe what’s in this folder. That you’ve chosen now to tell me the truth.”
“Believe it. Don’t believe it. But it’s all true.”
The truth, according to Eli and his assembled evidence, made elegant sense. The dossier told a simple story.
Item: One birth certificate for a Max Lewis.
Item: Faded newsprint testifying to the death of Max Lewis in 1996, at age three.
Item: One photocopied sheet of IDs, each with Max’s photo, each with a different name, Max Schwarz, Max Black, Max Voják.
Item: Email, addressed to anon34, detailing the successful effort to acquire Chris as a roommate and use him to monitor Professor Anton Hoffpauer’s research program.
Item: Email, to same, with updates on research protocol and progress made.
Item: Email, to same again, describing the recent discoveries of a certain Nora Kane, who might be vyvolená.
Item: Email, to Max, from anon34, advising that he go forward immediately, dated the night of Chris’s death.
Item: One photograph of Max and two strange men on the steps of a church, all three in black robes.
Those were the highlights.
“He was one of them,” Eli said. “I’m sorry. But there it is.”
I shook my head. That felt too feeble. “No.”
“He told you himself—the Hledači monitor everyone working on the Voynich manuscript. Max was sent to Chapman. He was assigned to Chris. And to you.”
“No.”
“The police couldn’t find any record of his parents, of his past. It’s because he doesn’t have one. It was all a lie.”
It couldn’t all have been a lie.
I longed to return to that bloody riverbank, to throw myself in the path of the final arrow, Elizabeth had written, to die ignorant, and so, in love. Better to be killed by an arrow than by the words of the one I most trusted.
“That letter you found in his room, it’s like the original membership recruiting brochure. Hledači carry them when they’re on important missions. It’s some kind of badge of honor. He must have gotten in some serious trouble for leaving it behind.”
“What about the other letters? The ones under Chris’s desk. They weren’t his, were they?”
He hesitated, then shrugged. “They don’t matter.”
“They do to me.” I needed to know if Chris had been a part of this.
“They weren’t his,” Eli said. “You needed incentive to get involved.”
“You? You planted them.”
He didn’t respond.
“So the other letter, you planted that one, too.”
“No. I didn’t even know he had it until you showed it to me.”
I snorted. “I’ll just take your word for it, then.”
“That letter belonged to Max. Think about it. He brought you to Prague—you and Elizabeth’s letter. Or did you think that conveniently timed scholarship money was just the universe’s way of saying thank you for being a friend?”
“How did you know about that?”
“And it doesn’t seem strange to you that the Hledači conveniently left us alone to track down the pieces of the Lumen Dei, then struck at the very moment there was nothing left for us to find?”
“It’s almost like they had a man on the inside,” I said pointedly, but he was on a roll.
“And last night. Dinner was his idea. The bridge was his idea, and like you said, they were waiting for us. He delivered us right into their hands. Us and every piece of the Lumen Dei that we managed to track down—because he insisted on being the one to carry them.”
“So why would they kill him?”
“They must have double-crossed him. Maybe it was punishment for the mess he made.”
“The mess. You mean Chris.”
He nodded.
“Where’s the knife?” I asked.
“Nora, I swear, I’m not here to hurt you. I—”
“Then you won’t mind me holding the knife. While we talk.”
It was longer than I’d expected, and heavier. I felt better with it in my hand.
“I would tell you more if I could,” he said. “Believe me. But the less you know, the safer you are.” He tapped the folder. “You weren’t ever supposed to see this.”
“So why show it to me?”
“You needed to know.”
“Who are you?” I said again, though I told myself the answer no longer mattered. He was a liar, a good one. A liar and a forger, who delighted in pain.
Or he wasn’t.
“We’re going to tell Adriane that I’m a PI hired by Chris’s parents to find his killer,” he said.
“But that’s not true, is it.”
“No.”
“You want me to lie to her.”
“Yes.”
Because lies were nothing to him.
“Why would I do that?” I asked.
Max was a terrible liar, I reminded myself. He blushed; he fidgeted. He told truths no one wanted to hear.
He told me he loved me.
People lied for a reason. They lied to fill a need—for gain, for escape. But I’d had nothing he needed.
He said he needed me.
“I can protect you,” Eli said. “That’s why I’m here.”
Another lie, and this one I could read on his face. “I don’t want your protection,” I said. “I want your help.”
“Semantics.”
“Help to go after them. The Hledači. To destroy them.”
I saw his answer before he voiced it, in the taut muscles of his neck, the narrowing of his eyes, beneath his lies, a truth: “That’s all I want.”
“Why?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“What can you tell me?” I said.
“What do you want to know?”
I wanted to un-know, un-see. To hand the folder back without opening it. To leave the postcard on my brother’s grave, to stay in Chapman wondering whether I would ever see Max again, believing he would save me. I wanted not to question him when he could no longer answer. I wanted not to doubt. I did not want to know.
I wanted to believe.
“What did the priest say to you, on that first day? The one you fought with in the Church of St. Boethius.”
I could tell I had surprised him.
“I can’t tell you that, either,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Okay—then tell me what the Hledači meant on the bridge, about my destiny.” The word that they had called me, the word that had appeared in Max’s email. What was supposedly Max’s email. “What’s vyvolená?”
“Chosen,” he said. “The chosen one. You.”
The single bark of laughter came unbidden. He didn’t crack a smile.
“The Hledači believe that ta, která ho najde, bude jako ta, která ho ukryla.” he said. “ ‘She who discovered it will be as she who disguised it.’ ”
“No one’s discovered it yet,” I said. “Isn’t that their main problem?”
“You found the map,” he said. “They’ve been searching for it for centuries. They believe God guided your hand, that you must be Elizabeth Weston’s spiritual heir. Lumen Dei má v krvi, její krev je v Lumen Dei. ‘The Lumen Dei is in her blood, as her blood is in the Lumen Dei.’ Her blood. Your blood.”
“Trust me, I am not related to Elizabeth Weston.”
“You’re thinking literally,” he said. “They’re thinking spiritually.”
“So they don’t literally want my blood.”
“Well …”
“Great.”
“It’s why Max got close to you,” he said. “And why he convinced you to come to Prague—why he pretended to help you track down the pieces. Because they needed the vyvolená to be the one to find the Lumen Dei.”
The Hoff had known, I realized. You’re the one, he had said. They’ll lie. But don’t go! Could he have meant that Max would lie,
would kill, would do anything to get me to Prague to fulfill my supposed destiny?
Max, I remembered, was the one who found him.
“That doesn’t explain why you pretended to help,” I said. “Or how you know any of this.”
“I knew some from the beginning. I know more now. And I told you. I’m here to protect you—”
“Because I’m vyvolená. Right. So you’re crazy, too.”
“Because if they think you’re the vyvolená, you’re in danger. They’ll want to use you, just like Max did.”
“Max loved me.”
“That doesn’t mean he wasn’t using you.”
“And you? What have you been doing all this time? Pretending to care about Chris? About—any of it?”
“Using you,” he said.
I felt no satisfaction from the admission. I suspected it would be a long time before I felt anything again. “And are you sorry?”
“I … regret the need.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“I know.”
“Are you one of them?” I asked.
“No.”
“Are you lying?”
“No.”
“You want me to believe that everything about Max was a lie. Everything he said, everything he did. Everything between us. All lies. That he was a murderer. And all those months with him, I just never noticed.”
“He was good,” Eli said.
“So how good are you?”
“If their agenda was my agenda, we wouldn’t be here right now,” he said. “I would just give them what they want the most.”
“Me.”
“You.”
“With your crazy ninja skills.”
“They come in handy.”
“When you want them to,” I said. If Max was Hledači, and Eli had known, he’d likely wasted little effort trying to save Max from his own, the men who’d pushed him to the edge of the bridge, and over it. If Max was Hledači, if everything unthinkable was true, then maybe I should have felt grateful.
I still felt cold. “Get out now. Please.”
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“Oh, so sorry, but I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. I’m sure you understand.”
The Book of Blood and Shadow Page 31
